Conference Agenda

In the manuscript tradition of thirteenth-century French motets, a handful mix Occitan vocabulary into their lyrics and have thus been labeled “hybrid” Franco-Occitan motets; for individual words, “hybrid” forms dismissed as artistic corruptions reveal themselves instead as markers of specific regional dialects. Most scholars have concluded that these “hybrid” motets’ linguistic mixing stemmed from French composers deliberately borrowing Occitan words to evoke the troubadours’ prestige (c.f., Zingesser 2020, Aubrey 1997). However at the level of vocabulary, the concept of “hybridity,” stands in for words that fail to align with standard dictionary forms, oversimplifying the rich dialectal variation that characterized medieval Romance languages. Words that appear to mix elements of both standardized French or Occitan need not be interpreted as corruptions, for medieval dialects of both language families were always already influenced by each other and constantly redefined by admixture through a process called koineization (c.f., Lodge 2004).

In this paper I demonstrate how attention to regional dialects can reveal composers’ and scribes’ linguistic backgrounds, offering new explanations for supposedly anomalous word forms in the motet tradition. Navigating composers’ dialects, scribes’ spelling norms, and linguistic mixing afforded by manuscripts, I show how the so-called “hybridized” words in the Ars antiqua motet Tuit cil qui sunt enamourat/ Li jalous sunt fustat/ Veritatem align closely with the Gascon dialect rather than some invented “hybrid” between French and Occitan. This example—continuing to defy clear categorization since István Frank’s 1954 philological analysis—spotlights Occitan’s dialectal diversity and the shortcomings of treating the langue d’oc family as a monolith.

While previous scholarship has struggled to distinguish scribal interventions from composers’ original choices, dialectal analysis provides new criteria for differentiating these transmission layers. For Tuit cil, Gascon vocabulary illuminates the composer’s linguistic background, while transformations into French morphology betray the scribe’s hand. This approach—particularly apt for treating “hybrid” motets in the Montpellier Codex and La Clayette manuscript—points to a model of motet creation outside the cultural sphere of Paris, with composers referencing familiar dialects rather than resorting to prestigious or hegemonic varieties and adaptation taking place at the hands of manuscript scribes.

Celebratory or honorific motets abound in the repertoire. This paper focuses on one such motet, Triumphat hodie/Trop est fol, composed in England in the first decades of the fourteenth century. Surviving incompletely in two manuscripts, London British Library 24198 and Oxford New College 362, Triumphat/Trop presents a puzzling pair of poetic texts as well as several additional unique features.

The motet’s Latin text celebrates St Lawrence; it recounts how the prodigious martyr triumphed over the enemy. The subject of its pair of Anglo-Norman French tenors, however, is cuckoldry; a woman has an extra-marital affair. The pairing of these texts has long given scholars pause, but I will demonstrate that there is indeed a clear connection between these two seemingly unrelated subjects.

Further, I will elucidate and illustrate several of Triumphat/Trop’s innovative characteristics. While on the one hand, this four-voice voice-exchange motet features several typical ‘English’ characteristics, such as the alliterative text beginnings, on the other, it exhibits many truly unique musical, textual, and formal features, not only within the extant insular repertory, but also in relation to contemporaneous continental counterparts. For example, the motet includes what may be the only extant example of syllables of individual words being distributed alternately between two upper voices.

The main arguments of this paper are thus two-fold: that the two texts were paired together with clear intention, and that the remarkable level of compositional ingenuity befits the saint that the motet celebrates, St Lawrence.

While Carlo Gesualdo’s (1566-1613) secular madrigals exemplify his Manneristic style, his sacred work is not scrutinized to the same degree as his secular output. Even though the Tanabrae Responsoria (1611) receives adequate attention, scholars sometimes overlook his two volumes of Sacrae Cantiones (1603), as the sacred motets seem less complex on the surface. Through further development of the groundwork laid by Alfred Einstein and Glenn Watkins, this paper argues that the Sacrae Cantiones presents the same symbolic element of Marian worship as Gesualdo’s commissioned altarpiece, Il Perdono di Gesualdo (1609) in his private chapel, Maria delle Grazie, as a last-ditch effort to rebalance his humors and a plea for the Virgin Mary to absolve his sins.

Einstein and Watkins prefaced the correlation between Gesualdo’s commissioned altarpiece and his sacred work, where Gesualdo embodies his self in the Manneristic style, contrasting with the relatively tamer madrigalism paired with the Marian-focused passages. The Virgin Mary, as the patroness of all humanity, is presented in both the painting and the sacred motets as a symbol to intercede for the late composer, as the protector of his soul against the Redeemer. In addition to Marian worship, Gesualdo included his uncle Charles Borromeo amongst other saintly figures in the artwork as tribute, where Borromeo’s influence can be seen in the Eucharist celebration in O sacrum convivium. This paper views the inclusion of the Virgin Mary and other saints in art objects, injected with Geusaldo’s self, as a last resort to stabilize his ever-eroding humoral balance in his final years. By interpreting Gesualso’s commission of the painting at his chapel and examining a few selections from the Sacrae Cantiones, this paper presents Gesualdo’s injection of self-expression in his artworks as a symbolic element and desperate attempt to rebalance his humor and partition the Virgin Mary to save his soul.